TalkSPORT: Here come the boys

Once known as redneck radio for white van man, talkSPORT is the underdog that barked its way to the top of the tree. Carole Cadwalladr meets the "renegades and ne'er-do-wells" behind one of Britain's favourite radio stations

After a couple of days of listening to talkSPORT's output, there's an awful lot of things I know. Things I never thought I'd ever need to know. That I didn't previously realise I didn't know. And that I now wonder if there's any way I can de-know. Because to tune into 1089/1053 AM is, basically, to take a crash course in blokeology. For me, a talkSPORT ingenue, it is Bloke-ish for Beginners, with the presenters leading me into alien territory (football, basically, but so minutely dissected that they could be talking about hare coursing or trout tickling); while the advertisements open up a world of products I didn't even know existed, much less ever imagined wanting.

At the start of the day, for example, I have no opinions, really none, on West Ham. Twenty-four hours later, I know so much about Avram Grant I feel like I may once have been married to him. I have learned that if you want 18-mil, cell four MDF, Selco, "Where The Trade Goes", has opened a new warehouse in Catford. And that Paddy Power is an actual person. Who knew? If I'd given the betting firm any thought at all I'd have assumed it was the kind of name dreamed up by a branding consultancy to convey a sort of quaint, faux-Irish charm. But no. There is an actual Mr Power who's barely ever out of the talkSPORT schedules. Because betting, like purchasing WD40 and making the household decisions on where to buy tyres, are, it seems, Things Men Do. And because this is the station "For Men Who Love Sport".

"Although, of course, we do have lots of women listeners," Paul Hawksbee, who co-presents the afternoon show with Andy Jacobs, tells me. "It's not like the old days where if a female listener rang in, everybody would be like…" he puts on a cave-man voice, and beats his chest: "…WOMAN!"

Tuning into talkSPORT is, therefore, to enter a strange, parallel audio universe, but it's also one that has become the broadcasting phenomenon of recent times. And which has finally been recognised by the industry. Because, last month, the station, which has been around for only just over a decade, operating with a tiny staff on a shoestring budget, won three gold awards at the Sony Radio Academy Awards – the medium's equivalent of the Oscars. Not just that, it carried off the top accolade: Station of the Year. It's the little station that could, the underdog that has gone from being the joke of the radio waves to a commercially successful operation that has put on a million new listeners in a single year.

It's true that it is still referred to, in certain quarters, as "White Van Man Radio". And, it has a not-entirely-unwarranted reputation for being the station of last resort for the nation's sexists and reprobates. Its latest star signings are Andy Gray and Richard Keys, freshly disgraced from Sky (where they made off-air comments about the competence of a female linesman); it also boasts George Galloway and Stan Collymore, and it was where Russell Brand made his first radio excursion after Sachsgate. But, even if you know nothing about sport, it's properly interesting broadcasting. Listening to my first drive-time phone-in, there's a full-on barney when a West Ham fan goes into meltdown. And then Rod Stewart phones in.

"I saw his name flash up on the screen," presenter Adrian Durham tells me the next day. "And I thought… It can't be. And it was!"

"I were gutted I missed it," his co-presenter, ex-England cricketer Darren Gough (aka "Goughie") says. "But we do get a lot of people phoning in. All the footballers, cricketers, sportsmen, they all listen. I know they do, because that's how I got into it. I used to listen when I played. And they phone us up. And Brucie, last year, remember that? Bruce Forsyth rang in."

It's the interaction between the presenters, many of whom are retired professional sportsmen, and the listeners that has somehow made talkSPORT the success it was never quite meant to be. And a large part of that is down to Moz Dee, the former Radio 5 Live editor, who this year won Sony gold award for Station Programmer of the Year. "Moz offered me a job when he came over three years ago," Danny Kelly, who presents an evening slot, told me. "And I had my doubts because it really wasn't a great station at the time. But within weeks I loved it. I think of it like a pirate ship. Not a pirate-radio ship. But an actual fireworks-in-the-beard, proper pirate ship. It's so small and it's filled with these renegades and ne'er-do-wells who wouldn't really find a home anywhere else, and the talk just flies. You get these brilliant calls. And they know all the presenters. Properly know them. Any big sporting event, the BBC spends days beforehand setting it all up, whereas talkSPORT turns up a couple of hours before the match in a van that looks like it's out of The Sweeney, and just starts broadcasting, with the presenters just saying what they think, and somehow it manages to give the listeners a far better flavour of what's actually going on."

In fact, talkSPORT is a success that's been built on the back of failure: it was born from the corpse of Talk Radio UK, the deliberately "controversial" station founded by an American company back in 1995. "Which really didn't work," says Moz Dee. He should know. Before 5 Live, he was in at the launch of Talk Radio UK, as one of their breakfast-show DJs. "They were trying to recreate what is a very successful format in the United States. Which is talk. And I make a very clear distinction between talk and formatted speech – which is Radio 5 Live and Radio 4. It was free-flow talk. But no one quite knew what that meant so there were these Americans saying you've got to be on the edge, you've got to be in people's faces. I'd come from BBC local radio and we didn't really know what that meant. Basically, you ended up saying bollocks a lot." It was, he says, pretty much "mayhem".

"And then Kelvin MacKenzie bought it," says Moz. Which, of course, is just what an ailing, shock-jock radio station needs: the man who put "Gotcha!" on the front page of the Sun, and who at Live TV gave the world topless darts and the weather dwarves. "He was a fantastically colourful, charismatic personality," says Moz, diplomatically. "And he has to be credited for the vision. The name, the brand, the concept, they were all his ideas. He was the one who realised it could work for sport. It was a bit of a culture shock, yes. Like firing people on air, when they've been on air for an hour, which is what happened to me with Kelvin."

And then, slightly less diplomatically, he launches into a pitch-perfect Kelvin impression. "I was programme director for a wee bit before I went to 5 Live and we'd just started a new presenter and he rang me up and he says, 'Who's that on air?' And I said, 'It's this new round-up of news and sport we're just starting.' And he said, 'I don't like 'em. Get 'em off. Get 'em OFF!' And I said, OK, listen, I'll talk to them at the end of the month. 'End of the month? End of the fucking month? Fucking 'ell. You'll be going with them end of the month! You're not getting me, are you son? I want them off! NOW! I don't want them on ANOTHER MINUTE.' So I had to go in, pull these poor guys off air, God forgive me, put someone else on, and the audience came back after the break and had absolutely no idea what had happened to them. They just vanished."

The station has, he says, quite a lot of "baggage" from the Kelvin years. They now bid and own rights to commentate on Premier League matches, but back then, when it was all sewn up by the BBC, the Kelvin MacKenzie solution to the inconvenient fact of not being allowed into the 2000 European Championships was to report live from a hotel room, somewhere near Euro 2000, where the commentators would be watching the match on the TV.

The station has changed, Dee says, "partly by building credibility and – dare I use this word? – journalism. Some commentators still look at us and seem to believe we get up every morning, drag ourselves out of a cave, dust ourselves down and get out our microphones."

Why do you call it "dare-I-say journalism"? "Because when you talk about us, people sort of smirk at you when you use those big words."

Later, though, I meet Sean Dilley, talkSPORT's lobby correspondent. It's definitely journalism that he's doing. "There's so many stories for us," he says. "There's so much sport in politics and vice versa. And now of course all the politicians want to come on. Three years ago you couldn't get them. We were considered 'red-neck radio'. Now, we got the last audio interview with Gordon Brown. The first one with Ed Miliband. David Cameron's coming on later this month. Sport is so popular it's a religion. If you ignore talkSPORT, basically, you ignore the public."

There's a pleasingly left-field quality to much of talkSPORT. Chip, Dilley's guide-dog – he's blind – is let off his lead and bounds around the office, the editorial floor of which is roughly the size and layout of a domestic flat. There's a kitchen, a lounge area, a handful of desks, and occasionally people wander off in the direction of the bathroom, although it turns out this is actually the studio. It's here that, in a no-nonsense way, they broadcast to their 3.25 million listeners, a figure that's up 36% on a year ago. Moz looks less like the bossman-in-charge than the work experience boy. Alice, the press officer, is the most charming press officer in the history of press officers; she's writing a novel in her spare time. When I'm interviewing the news reporter, Ian Abrahams, universally known on the station as "The Moose", he says something and then adds, "Am I all right to say that?" to Alice. She shrugs. "Say whatever you want!"

And then there's Alan Brazil, the Glaswegian ex-top-flight footballer, who now co-hosts the breakfast show. He's done the job for 11 years. "I'm not one of those people who can watch EastEnders and then go to bed," he says. He hasn't really slept in a decade, but his lifestyle has now become part of the show. Kelvin MacKenzie sacked him twice, the second time when he got roaring drunk at the Cheltenham Gold Cup, slept through his alarm call and failed to turn up for his programme. But the listeners lobbied for his return and ever since he's simply regaled them with tales of his nights on the town.

"He has an astonishing constitution," says Ian Abrahams. "Sometimes he hasn't even slept. And yet he gets in, that light goes on, and bang, he's there, and he's brilliant."

Do you ever go out drinking with him? I ask.

"God, no. I would literally die. We were in Singapore for the Olympic bid, and our show was cancelled because of the London bombings, so we had the afternoon off. And I went out to the pool and he was there having a massage, saying to the waiter, 'I want you to bring me two Singapore Slings, pal. Every 20 minutes. D'you hear that? Two. Every 20 minutes.'"

Brazil is on air for a solid four hours from 6-10am, and then passes over to Andy Gray and Richard Keys. It's four months since the pair left Sky and the trauma is still fresh on their faces. I'm trying to be tactful, so I go for what I think is an inoffensive opening question. "Why talkSPORT?" I ask.

There's a pause.

"Well, it wasn't exactly planned," says Gray.

It was, inevitably, a controversial signing. The station has no female presenters. And it bills itself for men who love sport, when of course lots of women do, too. "We don't have a big sign saying 'No Women Allowed'," Moz Dee tells me. But some of your signings slightly send out that message, I argue.

It was for the talent, and their broadcasting experience, that he hired them, Dee says. That and their contacts. And it's true that footballers take their calls. And, in return, there's almost a puppy-like gratitude for being given a second chance. Being sacked by Sky "is not something I really want to talk about," says Gray. "It was a horrendous time in my life. It was a horrendous time in my family's life. What we were put through. And as far as I'm concerned it's gone now. This has been fantastic rehabilitation for us both, the station, and the people who work here. And we owe them a huge debt for coming along at a time in our life when we couldn't have been lower than we were."

It's quite a heartfelt speech, this. And it's not the first time I hear it. Mark Saggers, the veteran sports journalist, tells me at length how he was "unceremoniously dumped" by the BBC and he's just as fervent in his love of talkSPORT. "It's proper broadcasting! I had eight producers at the BBC. I couldn't say a word without it being approved first. The best thing I was told when I arrived here was 'Just be yourself.'"

There's something of the Church of the Second Chance about talkSPORT and the loyalty it inspires. I meet up with Stan Collymore, who's another 5 Live refugee. Another ex-sportsman with a chequered past. He now does a show with Saggers – "and we've talked about it all," Saggers says. "Stan's depression, his dogging, Ulrika. It's absolutely gripping broadcasting."

Collymore's somewhat defensive with me. Wary of journalists. Professional but guarded. Radio 5 Live have been trying to lure him back but he's refused to go. "I just got really fed up of listening to people like David Mellor talking about football. He used to be on BBC 5 Live's opposite kind of show to the one I do, which is a post-match phone-in. 5 Live is very straight down the line, middle-class sports output, whereas most of the footballing public are working class. So I was always listening to guys with these middle-class accents pontificating, and I just felt that there's not enough Geordies and Brummies and Scousers and Londoners being represented."

It's a point that isn't lost on Moz Dee. He comes from an Irish family, grew up in the Midlands, became an actor as a teenager, appearing in several David Puttnam films, and then set up his own theatre company and wrote plays before stumbling into radio. But he also worked with his dad on the building sites. "And some of the wisest men I've ever met have been in the back of a van. Who have properly lived life and who have a real insight into what life is like. So it does make me angry when people say, 'White Van Man. Flag of St George out the back. And a load of blokes, going Phwoar!' I never once saw that happen!"

Football has broken out of its ghetto. It's now the sport of brickies and prime ministers (Cameron claims to be a Villa fan, although Sean Dilley tells me he's checked Hansard and in 2001 he definitely wasn't). And talkSPORT has finally, perhaps, emerged from its ghetto, too. In the "creative" department where they make the programme trails and talkSPORT ads, I ask Peter Gee, the head of creative, who the audience is. He replies: "He's called Stan. And he lives in Walthamstow." Or at least, he was. That was the joke for years. "But now we've also got Crispin from Winchester and Tristan from Islington."

More than half the audience are ABC1s, Ford sponsors the breakfast show, "and we've got all sorts of solid blue-chip advertisers". "Still," I say. "I'd never realised quite how many builders' warehouses there are in Catford."

"Oh yes," says Peter. "My mate Stan goes there. But actually, so does Tristan from Islington. It's Everyman radio. It really is. And I think it always has been. It's just taken the world a little while to catch up."